Apparently wanting everyone to have the benefits of a college education is the height of snobbery now. I’m sure Rick Santorum’s anti-sex, anti-education message would go over really well in a general election.

A weak labor market, like the one we’ve experienced since the financial crisis in 2008, imposes enormous stress on people. Given the added anxiety created by a weak economy, you might think life expectancy would decline. Oddly, though, during recessions, exactly the opposite tends to happen: Life expectancy rises.

Now we know: Obama’s stimulus was actually a stealth death panel! Why does Obama hate Grandma so?

During a discussion with CNN’s Piers Morgan about tax rates, Christie made it known that he’s just about had it with Buffett, the world-famous investor who lent his name to a proposed tax hike on the rich.

“He should just write a check and shut up,” Christie said. “I’m tired of hearing about it. If he wants to give the government more money, he’s got the ability to write a check — go ahead and write it.”

So… in other words, Warren Buffett should give up more of his money to pay the freight for less-wealthy individuals who don’t want to contribute their fair share? Isn’t that exactly the sort of thing Republicans are always complaining about lower down on the income scale?

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990 at the age of 32, and from 1995 to 2007, served in the US Senate. In 2000, he was elected by his peers to the position of Senate Republican Conference Chairman.

Well, it turns out Ubuntu now runs on multi-core Android devices and your handset can grant a full desktop experience when docked with a display and a keyboard. It’s a customized version of Ubuntu that plays nice with Android, the two OS’s sharing data and services while running simultaneously. So, you can still access telephony and texts from the Ubuntu environment while enjoying all the computing capabilities it has to offer, including: Ubuntu TV, virtualization tools for running Windows applications, desktop web browsers, and Ubuntu apps built for ARM. It isn’t clear exactly what hardware you’ll need to run Ubuntu on a handset, but Canonical has said it works on multi-core devices with HDMI and USB connections.

As the owner of a multi-core Android device, this certainly piques my interest, but other than the Oh Cool! factor, being able to connect my phone up to a keyboard and monitor doesn’t really buy me much unless it’s in the form of one of those Atrix-style laptop/docking stations. Which means that this opens up a whole new market for third-party manufacturers to start making generic docking stations that any multi-core Android phone can use.

I don’t know if they necessarily will, but they can. I’m pretty sure a bunch will make a go of it, but I can’t predict how successful they’ll be. I know I would definitely be interested in being able to turn my phone into a netbook running a full-fledged (or close to it) desktop OS which can access the internet from pretty much anywhere.

It’s a funny thing: It used to be that smartphones ran scaled-down mobile OSes because they had tiny displays and nowhere near enough power to run a desktop OS. But now modern smartphones have dual (and soon quad) core processors, and even GPUs, that give them more than enough power to run a desktop OS. They just don’t have the screen real estate to display it (or in most cases, a keyboard to interact with it). With a bit more RAM, they could probably even run Windows 7.

So if you have a phone with netbook-class internals (or better), then why not give it the ability to actually be a netbook when the occasion arises? If my phone yearns to spread out and become a PC every once in a while, then who am I to deny it?

Charles Murray took the economic concept of moral hazard – the concept that if you reward people for bad behaviour then they behave badly – and turned it into prose. Reading the book moved me a notch to the right. It posed a challenge to liberals – to get more rigorous in our analysis. It showed the simple facts didn’t look so good for us and that we needed to address questions like, “Is welfare causing women to become single mothers?” Murray really challenged the way I thought.

What about questions like “Are bailouts and deregulation causing corporations to become more reckless and criminal?” Or “Are lax campaign finance laws giving politicians more incentive to betray their constituents than to represent them?”

“I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” Romney told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien this morning after his resounding victory in Florida on Tuesday. “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.”

“I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.”

It’s kinda hard to believe that he has any intention of fixing the poor’s safety net if he’s not concerned about them. Not to mention the fact that he is, well, a Republican, and cutting up the safety net is kind of what they do.

Also apparently the very poor are not the heart of America, and are not struggling. (True, he says the very rich aren’t the heart of America either, but unlike the poor they have our entire political system at their beck and call, so I think they’ll be okay.)

Why is it that when it comes to spending, no cut is too petty or small for Republicans, yet when it comes to taxes, any increase that doesn’t instantly wipe out the deficit in one stroke isn’t worth the bother?

This little snippet jumped out at me from a story about how Republicans hate Obama’s decision to defer a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline because he hates America:

Jim Oddie, a scuba instructor… ticked off the reasons Obama might have nixed the pipeline. “He doesn’t play for our team,” he said. “He wasn’t raised in the mainland of the United States. He doesn’t think America is exceptional. Come on—he grew up in Hawaii in 1961 when it had been a state for less than two years. Spent time in Indonesia.”

I wonder if this guy came out with this himself, or if these are the new talking points circulating around in right-wing Tea Party-land. They grudgingly admit that yeah, Obama was born in the US, but it doesn’t really count because Hawaii is barely part of America, and he spent time in another country!

Unlike full-on birtherism, this narrative has the virtue of being factually correct, but it still arrives at the same ridiculous place. I’m sure the many middle-aged Hawaiians (and probably Alaskans) will be surprised to hear that they’re not really Americans because they weren’t “raised in the mainland”.